Rapper Kanye West has released a new single.
Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage

Kanye West is ringing in 2016 with new music, with his first single in months, a type of year-in-review.

West posted the three-and-a-half minute track, titled FACTS, to his Soundcloud account on Thursday just after 9pm American eastern standard time. His wife Kim Kardashian West had enthusiastically flagged the impending release on Twitter.

The song opens with a sample of Dirt and Grime by Father’s Children, a Los Angeles jazz-funk band active in the late 1970s, then West enters with a reference to the Canadian rapper Drake: “Yeezy, Yeezy, Yeezy just jumped over Jumpman.

“Yeezy, Yeezy, Yeezy, I feel so accomplished/I did talk a lot of shit, but I just did the numbers,” West raps before going on to list his recent personal wins.

Among them are his collaboration with Adidas on the best-selling Yeezy Boosts (“I ain’t dropped the album, but the shoes went platinum”), and Kardashian West’s bespoke emoji set (“Kimoji just shut down the app store”).

“And we made a million a minute,” he repeats – putting into perspective somewhat his earlier boast of spending $10,000 on a fur for his daughter North ‘Nori’ West.

Nike’s still in West’s bad books (“Nike treat employees just like slaves”). He said the company refused to award him royalties on the sales of their sneaker collaboration; he departed for Adidas in 2014.

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“If Nike ain’t have Drizzy, man they wouldn’t have nothin’,” raps West – another reference to Drake. “Yeezy, Yeezy, Yeezy, they line up for days/Nike out here bad, they can’t give shit away.”

West’s collaboration with Adidas helped the European brand blow its competition out of the water last year – at least insofar as success is measured in likes on Instagram.

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Meanwhile, within the narrow context of problems West is confronted with by fame, “couches, couches, couches, which one should I pick?” could be 2016’s answer to 2011’s “hurry up with my damn croissant”. (“I need extra deep,” he concludes.)

FACTS ends on a existential note – “We just blessed to be alive” – and a tribute to the late Chicago DJ Timbuck2.

It was produced by Atlanta’s Metro Boomin, who worked with Drake on his September 2015 mixtape with the rapper Future, What A Time To Be Alive.

Response to the track on social media has ranged from euphoric to irate.